t as well be dead as rottin' here."

Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as
slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin
coarsened from lack of care and from overeating. And in her children's
ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You
can get away from it," she counseled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you
be a rube like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they
profited by her advice. Minnie went to work in Commercial when she was
seventeen, an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheap
finery. At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with roving
tendencies. They moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one
job. John, the older boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was
her mother's daughter. Restless, dissatisfied, emptyheaded, he was the
despair of his father. He drove the farm horses as if they were
racers, lashing them up hill and down dale. He was forever lounging
off to the village or wheedling his mother for money to take him to
Commercial. It was before the day of the ubiquitous automobile. Given
one of those present adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his
career much earlier. As it was, they found him lying by the roadside
at dawn one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with the
wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolen the
horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led them
stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a rendezvous of
his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not have hurt him, but
evidently he had been dragged almost a mile before his battered body
became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood and the reins.

That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife
together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her
hatred of the locality and the life.

"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless
reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make
a farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your
hand at Dike now for a change."

Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at
him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come
honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he
was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors.
Apple